Pivotal demo set stage for tech revolution
We take it all for granted now, but it started back in ’68 ...
Long before PCs and the web became ubiquitous, Doug Engelbart stood up at a computing conference at San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium for a revolutionary demo. He showed off a mouse made of wood that could manipulate electronic text and a computer that displayed different programs in windows on a screen. He collaborated with colleagues miles away using video. When it was over, he got a standing ovation.
In just 90 minutes, in front of about 1,000 people Dec. 9, 1968, Engelbart kicked off the personal computing revolution and changed everything.
Among those watching were technologists who would devise many more of the advances we now take for granted when we use a computer, a tablet and even our phones.
Alan Kay was there. Among his many contributions to computing, he later pioneered the graphical user interface, which is why we can see icons, images and photos on computers. Andy Van Dam was there, too. He later helped create hypertext, which led to the technology that allows us to navigate web pages.
At the time of the demo by Engelbart — an engineer who was director of Stanford Research Institute’s Augmentation Research Center — computing was the domain of technologists and researchers, done on big mainframes that belonged to large organizations or the government.
“What if in your office, you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer that was alive for you all day?” Engelbart asked the audience. His most famous invention may have been the mouse, but half a century ago, he showed the world the possibility of an informationbased workforce.
“It was the mother of all demos,” author and journalist Steven Levy wrote in “Insanely Great,” a 1994 book about one of the groundbreaking products that eventually followed that pivotal moment: Apple’s Macintosh.
But it’s not just Apple that indirectly owes its success to Engelbart and that demo. Iconic Silicon Valley tech companies such as Intel (which had been founded only months before), Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo,
Google, eBay and YouTube were either based on — or could not have thrived without — the rise of personal computing. And without the PC revolution, Facebook and Twitter could not have changed the way people communicate, inspired revolutions, affected elections and altered the course of our nation and the world.
“You can argue that (Engelbart) was the most influential computer scientist ever,” said Adam Cheyer, one of the creators of Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant.
Cheyer and other tech pioneers, such as Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf, who are known as the inventors of the World Wide Web and a father of the internet, respectively, will gather today at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View to celebrate the golden anniversary of Engelbart’s demo.
Paul Saffo, a longtime tech forecaster and friend of Engelbart who will emcee the event, said he’s “delighted that Silicon Valley is actually beginning to pay attention to its own history.”
“It’s a chance to introduce a whole new generation to Doug’s vision,” Saffo said. “Who’s going to hear something today that will change their career …
who’s going to be the next Alan Kay?”
Kay also went on to develop the Dynabook, an ancestor of the laptop and tablet, and a programming language called Smalltalk, at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. His work begat the Alto, a computer with graphics and windows and an integrated mouse, which wowed Apple co-founder Steve Jobs at a 1979 demonstration at PARC and inspired the Lisa computer, then the Macintosh.
As for Menlo Park-based SRI, it has been instrumental in other technological advances, including the internet, domain names, virtual private networks, surgical robots and more since the
demo of its most famous former employee 50 years ago.
“It’s easy to get caught up in the physical manifestation (of technology),” Bill Mark, SRI’s president of Information and Computing Sciences, said in a recent interview at the nonprofit, which does research in conjunction with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and also licenses its technology to corporations. “What Engelbart was trying to do was enhance human capability to solve the problems that are around us.”
Cheyer agrees. He was a program director for the massive DARPA-backed SRI program called CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes), which worked on creating a personal cognitive assistant. That eventually led to Siri. After selling Siri to Apple, Cheyer founded Viv Labs, creator of the Bixby virtual assistant, which was then bought by Samsung. He also helped start petition site Change.org.
“Siri and Bixby were meant to augment humans’ capabilities, not replace a human,” he said. “How do you harness the collective intelligence of the world to solve urgent global problems? That’s what Doug was about.”
For SRI, where research reigns, that work continues. Mark sees speech, artificial intelligence and machine learning as the areas that hold the most promise for the next stage of computing.
“Once we get into (deeper) conversation (with machines), that’ll be another whole new world,” Mark said.
To talk about that possible new world — and celebrate the past — the Doug Engelbart Institute is putting on today’s anniversary event, along with co-sponsors Google, Cerf and the museum. There will also be commemorations in Japan and England.
Christina Engelbart helped her father start the institute, whose mission is to preserve his legacy and try to further his lifelong goal of using information technology to solve important problems. Like others who knew him, she emphasized that the life work of her dad — who died in 2013 at age 88 — was much more than just the tools he created.
“It was toward an end,” she said. “He was always thinking bigger. … Every company should have something like that going on inside it. They need to keep improving the way they improve so they can be more purposeful about what they’re producing and how it’s affecting the world.”
“What if in your office, you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer that was alive for you all day?”
— Doug Engelbart, an engineer who was director of Stanford Research Institute’s Augmentation Research Center, at a computing conference at San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium on Dec. 9, 1968